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There's a lot of Python dislike on here, so I thought I'd add my anecdotal story. I learned Basic, C, Assembly, and Matlab in college (in that order). However,

There's a lot of Python dislike on here, so I thought I'd add my anecdotal story. I learned Basic, C, Assembly, and Matlab in college (in that order). However, I was never a very good programmer. After graduating, I bought an intro to Python book and read it cover to cover and did the examples. I then started writing scripts and it all kind of clicked. I found it really simple to build stuff. There's lists, tuples, dictionaries, functions, iterating, easy branching...etc. There wasn't a whole lot to remember. I did find it confusing at first why some things used function syntax min(a) and other things used object oriented notation like mylist.sort(), but it wasn't too hard to remember all the stuff I actually needed. I was able to start using classes when I felt I was ready. Since then I've read books on and played around with Clojure, Common Lisp, Haskell, APL, Forth, Prolog, Ada, Powershell, Perl, Bash, Awk, Julia, C#, SQL...etc. During that time, I've found that Python holds it's ground in being very expressive, while easy for others to understand and performant enough for most uses with libraries like Numpy. Each time I try to move to a "grown-up" language like Java, I'm shocked at how verbose and clunky everything is. Sure it's great for production systems, but it's awful at just getting stuff done. Python is used almost exclusively by all engineers at my company (some C#) in hundreds of automation scripts. Some programs are 10,000+ lines of code and are still maintained and easily read by others. We're mostly electrical engineers too, so everyone picked up coding on their own and we find most codebases are still pretty consistent. I think Ada is a neat language for high reliability systems, but I don't think I'd choose it as a teaching language due to a lot of the friction with getting simple programs to work and wrestling with types. I've had very few issues with types in Python. I generally just use string, int, and float conversions when needed.

pkolaczk 6y ago
I started the other way round and came to Python long after I coded a lot in statically typed languages like Object Pascal, C++, Java, Scala and Rust. My feelings about Python are quite opposite to yours. I'm actually quite surprised how clunky Python is from my perspective. I expected a small, simple beginner-friendly language, optimized for gluing stuff together, but I've found a huge number of overlapping features and idioms, more ways to do the same thing than in Scala, half-broken libraries with poor inline documentation, lot of "stringly" typed code everywhere where programmers don't seem to know other types than strings, ints and dicts, no ADTs / pattern matching, package version conflicts and all that with no help from the type system and unreliable help from IDE autocomplete. Type annotations help a bit, but they are still far behind what's available in modern statically typed languages. I've also run into a few things that were weirdly complex to do compared to other languages - e.g sending rest requests in parallel. Something I'd expect a glue language shine at. It just feels like a major step backwards at least vs Scala and Rust which I used most recently. So maybe it is a matter of earlier experience, familiarity and expectations?
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  Possibly lol. I find Rust & Scala to also require far too much boilerplate to get simple stuff done. I suppose it depends on your intent. If you're writing a bunch of glue code, I seriously doubt Rust will be anywhere near as easy to reason about. Based on my own experience with the language, I can't imagine any coworkers ever grokking the language. Python on the other hand is picked up pretty quick. The beauty of Python is you don't need all that boilerplate nonsense like even having yo know what ADTs are or pattern matching or factory factory class. In Python, you just write code. A lot of people just have a few globals and a bunch of little functions and others use classes. Maybe your domain is different? I might hate Python as much as you if I had to build a bunch of large backend code bases.
  - pkolaczk 6y ago
    Not sure what boilerplate in Rust or Scala you're talking about. I admit Rust is much harder to learn initially, but once learned properly, the amount of code in both languages is very similar (as long as we're not comparing one program calling out to a library and another one doing everything from scratch). Both can be very high level. Here is a study where they've found Python to be not much less verbose than Java actually, despite Java being generally considered a verbose language: https://blog.wolfram.com/2012/11/14/code-length-measured-in-14-languages/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2012/11/14/code-length-measured-in-... > I seriously doubt Rust will be anywhere near as easy to reason about. I find Rust easier to reason about because there are certain constraints on sharing mutable state forcing developers to keep to very simple data flows (complex data flows / dependencies are getting hard very quickly and the compiler will fight that a lot with you). Python has none of these, so reasoning about data structures that can be freely shared and mutated anywhere can be hard. Python needs a lot of self-discipline to not end up with unmaintainable code.
    - 7thaccount 6y ago
      That study is also based off of Rosetta code tasks. I'm not sure if that accurately portrays code in the wild. Java codebases are full of design patterns that are entirely uneccessary in Python. Ever hear someone talk about design patterns for Python? It exists, but it is niche instead of the norm and I've literally never heard it mentioned in hundreds of hours talking about Python with coworkers. I'm sure Rust makes lots of sense when it comes to concurrency and systems programming, but that's not where Python shines or is meant to be used. In scripting, task automation, data science...etc it is really hard to beat. So maybe we're arguing over the usage of an axe and a sword on the battlefield and not about different swords lol.

pkolaczk 6y ago

I started the other way round and came to Python long after I coded a lot in statically typed languages like Object Pascal, C++, Java, Scala and Rust. My feelings about Python are quite opposite to yours. I'm actually quite surprised how clunky Python is from my perspective. I expected a small, simple beginner-friendly language, optimized for gluing stuff together, but I've found a huge number of overlapping features and idioms, more ways to do the same thing than in Scala, half-broken libraries with poor inline documentation, lot of "stringly" typed code everywhere where programmers don't seem to know other types than strings, ints and dicts, no ADTs / pattern matching, package version conflicts and all that with no help from the type system and unreliable help from IDE autocomplete. Type annotations help a bit, but they are still far behind what's available in modern statically typed languages. I've also run into a few things that were weirdly complex to do compared to other languages - e.g sending rest requests in parallel. Something I'd expect a glue language shine at. It just feels like a major step backwards at least vs Scala and Rust which I used most recently. So maybe it is a matter of earlier experience, familiarity and expectations?

7thaccount 6y ago
Possibly lol. I find Rust & Scala to also require far too much boilerplate to get simple stuff done. I suppose it depends on your intent. If you're writing a bunch of glue code, I seriously doubt Rust will be anywhere near as easy to reason about. Based on my own experience with the language, I can't imagine any coworkers ever grokking the language. Python on the other hand is picked up pretty quick. The beauty of Python is you don't need all that boilerplate nonsense like even having yo know what ADTs are or pattern matching or factory factory class. In Python, you just write code. A lot of people just have a few globals and a bunch of little functions and others use classes. Maybe your domain is different? I might hate Python as much as you if I had to build a bunch of large backend code bases.
- pkolaczk 6y ago
  Not sure what boilerplate in Rust or Scala you're talking about. I admit Rust is much harder to learn initially, but once learned properly, the amount of code in both languages is very similar (as long as we're not comparing one program calling out to a library and another one doing everything from scratch). Both can be very high level. Here is a study where they've found Python to be not much less verbose than Java actually, despite Java being generally considered a verbose language: https://blog.wolfram.com/2012/11/14/code-length-measured-in-14-languages/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2012/11/14/code-length-measured-in-... > I seriously doubt Rust will be anywhere near as easy to reason about. I find Rust easier to reason about because there are certain constraints on sharing mutable state forcing developers to keep to very simple data flows (complex data flows / dependencies are getting hard very quickly and the compiler will fight that a lot with you). Python has none of these, so reasoning about data structures that can be freely shared and mutated anywhere can be hard. Python needs a lot of self-discipline to not end up with unmaintainable code.
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    That study is also based off of Rosetta code tasks. I'm not sure if that accurately portrays code in the wild. Java codebases are full of design patterns that are entirely uneccessary in Python. Ever hear someone talk about design patterns for Python? It exists, but it is niche instead of the norm and I've literally never heard it mentioned in hundreds of hours talking about Python with coworkers. I'm sure Rust makes lots of sense when it comes to concurrency and systems programming, but that's not where Python shines or is meant to be used. In scripting, task automation, data science...etc it is really hard to beat. So maybe we're arguing over the usage of an axe and a sword on the battlefield and not about different swords lol.